Stratofanatic's Emporium

Mad Men: The Conference was a great success. Martina and I just finished watching the series a week ago -- after getting married, I've watched more television and film in the last five months than I have in the last 18 years. (Never in my life have I owned a television, but then Pop Culture pulled a fast one on me by inventing Hulu and Netflix.) Anyway, we loved Mad Men and, despite my pro forma elitist sneer at narratives in new media, not even I can deny that Mad Men has easily surpassed the vast majority of literature I've read. Martina, for her part, was extremely excited to participate in an academic conference -- although working at university administration for 18+ years, she never really did the academic-y side of academia before. Granted, we both went to the fantastic Tolkien Seminar in Leeds last summer, organized by the Tolkien Society, but that was smaller and less formal than most conferences. (The quality of the papers, however, was just as good if not better.) ...

So, lately, I've been doing a lot of work on rage . It initially formed the core of one of my dissertation chapters, but now it's bloated to incorporate a few chapters. My current chapter** uses rage as a centerpiece. Here's a problem: I haven't found many good discussions of rage. I'm using a Straussian perspective, so of course Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom (who did the relevant translation of The Republic, where the thymos constitutes one of the three parts of the souls) are major influences, but these discussions haven't quite handled all my lingering questions. That's why my writing goes so slow: I think I understand a concept, then I start writing about it, and my detail-oriented constantly encounters subtleties of formulation that I never suspected before. Several other books that I looked which mention thymos give unsatisfactory definitions of it. Anyway, thus it was with gratitude that I then encountered Angela Hobbes's Plato and the Hero . Here...

After a year of dissertation research on ole' Tollers, I can't believe I'm just encountering Troels Forchhammer's Tolkien Transactions , a fantastic attempt to catalog on-line Tolkien commentary, news, and criticism. It's a gold mine. So now I'm catching up on old posts, which is why I'm a few months late to the following debate. Apparently, a November article in the Los Angeles Review of Books,  " Tolkien Criticism Today " by Norbert Schürer, has caused a bit of a stir among Tolkienists. He reviewed a series of seven recent books on Tolkien, noted that some were much, much better than the others, then criticized such tendencies in the weaker books as bad writing, failure to properly develop the argument, preaching to the choir, etc. But while Schürer does have some infelicitous comments ( although  LOTR doesn't have "unrelenting" heroism, I like to be generous in my interpretation of such statements), what really seemed to raise ...

Some interesting stuff here. The English stuff was pretty good -- and Winnie the Pooh was even laugh out loud funny -- but I really hated The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. That's one of those not infrequent cases where the movie was surpassed the book by far. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame When I told my friend Sarah, who had done her MA thesis on adaptations of children's books, that I'd just read Wind, she asked me two serious question. (1) Did you like it? (Answer: yes, which was clearly the right answer and the one least likely to cause me bodily harm.) and (2) Who did you think was the hero, Mole or Toad? It didn't take me more than a second. "Initially Mole, but I think Toad hijacked the book halfway through." Then we bs'd a bit about that and Milne's play adaptation of the novel, Toad of Toad Hall . And while I did like this book, a few things stood out to me. First, the prose is suprisingly literary -- especially insofar as I've...

Aaaaaaaand . . . she's launched!!!! Matej just made the paperback version of  University of Solitude available on Amazon. (The Kindle version has been ready for a few weeks.) I couldn't be prouder of the missus for pulling off such an immense translation project. Having a book to her name is already a great coup for her resume. We decided that I shouldn't appear as a co-translator just for that reason, although me not knowing a word of Slovak also helps. (Martina did all the hard translating, I only helped with the copy editing and proofing.) But that doesn't matter. I still feel protective of the book. I don't have great hopes of the book doing all that well, actually, especially since Jon Stewart's movie about the same topic (i.e., someone falsely accused of espionage in Iran) didn't do well. Still got the fingers crossed, though. Here's the website for  University of Solitude . 

So, the Modern Language Association has just come out with a brand new edition. It's as if they thought, "Hey! We know our citation style is fine but, just for shoots and gaggles, let's have it marry APA and produce the ugliest baby possible." What followed is an abomination of nature/citation. In short, they're moving away from a prescriptive, rules-based citation style (because rules are repressive formalist thinking, a la Strunk & White) to a citation style that emphasizes the "rhetorical situation" of citation.  Basically, you have to have all the major elements (title, author, etc) in a set order, but everything else is apparently up to the citer. Which is all fine and well for practicing academics who already know the principles of citation, but try explaining this to freshman. It'll be a nightmare. Anyway, here's an example of the ugliness. Actually, the new citation method for monographs isn't all that bad. We go from Jacobs...

So, to avoid working on the diss, I've been working on some classics of fantasy literature. Either I've become fantastically  picky and judgmental (see what I did there?), or -- well, okay, I've just become fantastically picky and judgmental. Here goes. The Prydain Chronicles  by Lloyd Alexander. Made me bored and impatience. I vaguely remember seeing The Black Cauldron (book 2) in my middle-school library, but I never tried it -- something warned me away, proving once again that the child be wiser than the man. This time around, I read four of the five books (skipping book 4), and I knew going in to look for the Welsh influences. Well, the Welsh was all fine and good, although I never felt the appeal that many others apparently do. But the books themselves annoyed the hell out of me. The protagonist, Taran, is just some random boy who, for no reason that I could fathom, becomes the leader of his group. He collects a motley assortment of comrades, including a wayward p...

The wife-bear finally came back! She's been gone two weeks, first for a four-day trip to New York City, where she met up with two women from Czechland, then for an extended sojourn to Seattle, Washington. Her best friend, Dasha, has been talking for decades about seeing the home of her favorite writer, Betty McDonald. What? You never heard of Betty McDonald. Well, rest assured -- you're not alone. One of the idiosyncrasies of growing up in a communist country -- prior to 1989, anyway -- is that certain American writers get absurdly famous for sometimes incomprehensible reasons. Here's  everything you ever wanted to know  about Betty McDonald but, in short, she's a forgotten popular writer of four autobiographical novels centered on life in the northwest during the 1940s. Although her commentary about the local Native Americans has not aged well, she's mildly amusing in an ironic sort of way. I've only read The Egg and I, purchased in the Czech Republic, but d...

"Yes, of course, a true scholar can always find a straw man." Now that's the spirit!!

Wow. So, if you enjoy stories about the incompetence of government bureaucracy, keep on reading. So, they scheduled the work visa interview for me and Martina. (Shes' Czech, and we've already been successfully married on the marriage visa.) The interview's in Memphis. I just called them and said, "Hey, that's 4 hours driving away, isn't there something closer -- in Nashville, maybe?“ Apparently not. There's only one such USCIS center in Tennessee, and Gangland-Memphis is it. So, never mind how it screws over pretty everyone without easy transportation -- at least the Greyhound is a relatively straight shot. (Although an 8-hour trip on Greyhound . . . blech.) I had a second question, though. “ I don't have my birth certificate, but I do have my passport. Will they accept that document?“ The rep replied, “ Well, that depends on the center. You would have to schedule an interview to ask. Would you like me to schedule an interview?” “No. I told yo...

Had our Proofreading Party for the upcoming 6th issue of Scientia et Humanitas . For a while I thought I was going to be the prettiest girl at the party, but a staffer and the editor-in-chief both arrived on time. (Mini-rant: my biggest pet peeve is people who lack the professional courtesy to answer their e-mails. We never really expected anyone to show up, but e-mails letting us know would be nice. As it was, I figured it would only be me and the EiC today.) But things went well, regardless. Got most of the articles proofread, and I'll finish correcting the Word .docs tonight. The faculty reviews should come in by Monday -- ironically, Scientia's advisor is currently at the Medieval conference in Kalamazoo, along with about a gazillion Tolkien scholars. I've kept thinking that MLA was where the action was at, but I may have to change my thinking on that. Anyway, I'm ridiculously proud of Scientia. Our nine authors put in an insane amount of work. This is going to ...

Well, here 'tis . . .  my first foray into blogspot. I used to be a fanatical ( strato fanatical, even) blogger back in the day, first with deadjournal -- as the initial free alternative to livejournal -- then with livejournal itself. I got out of the habit, ironically, around the time I bought my first laptop and graduated my M.A. program . . . about 2008 or so. But, lately, I've developed a bad habit. Every time I desperately wish to avoid working on my dissertation, I tend to distract myself with Tolkien blogs. There's a surprising number of blogs kept by top scholars in the field, and reading through them has given me unique perspectives on various Tolkienana which doesn't normally make the mainstream academic sources. We'll see if the old urge re-kindles. Since all my reading (and thinking) has been focused heavily on academic matters of late, that'll probably be the direction this initially goes. Time will tell if Stratofanatic's Emporium is here...